Olivia Dean Tour: The Internet’s Newest Obsession and Why We’re All Here for It In the vast, ever-shifting landscape of internet culture, few things capture the collective imagination quite like a breakout artist on tour. Enter Olivia Dean, the UK-based singer-songwriter who’s been setting the digital world ablaze with her soulful tunes and magnetic stage…
Lucy Dacus: The Indie Rock Songstress Who’s Got the Whole World Singing Along Alright, gather ’round, internet denizens, because we’ve got a trend that’s not just a flash in the pan—it’s a full-blown indie rock revolution. Lucy Dacus, the Virginia-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, is taking the global music scene by storm, and we’re here to…
Grime Time: Why the UK’s Gritty Sound is Taking Over the World If you’ve been online recently, you’ve probably heard the term “grime” thrown around more than a teenager tossing around “lit” in 2016. But what exactly is grime, and why is it suddenly the hottest topic in global internet culture? Buckle up, because we’re…
Dua Lipa: The Pop Princess Who’s Got the Whole World Singing (and Dancing) If you’ve been anywhere near a radio, a club, or even a supermarket in the past few months, you’ve probably heard the name Dua Lipa at least once. The British-Albanian pop sensation is having a moment, and it’s not just because she’s…
Sam Fender and the Geopolitics of Working-Class Guitars By Our Correspondent Who Once Saw Bruce Springsteen Eat a Kebab in Naples The world’s most powerful nations spent last week arguing about grain corridors and semiconductor sanctions, yet the algorithmic overlords quietly slid Sam Fender—26-year-old Geordie with a voice like rusted shipyard steel—into the global top-50…
In Praise of the American South’s Slow-Motion Car Crash: Ethel Cain as Global Warning Label By the time the first church bell tolls in Perry, Florida, the rest of the planet has already turned the page—stock markets in Shenzhen, lunch lines in Lagos, TikTok teenagers in São Paulo scrolling past another clip of some girl…
The Empire Strikes a Chord: How BBC Radio 1 Became the World’s Guiltiest Pleasure By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic There’s a moment, usually around 02:47 GMT, when the night-shift nurse in Lagos, the rideshare driver in Jakarta, and the insomniac coder in Vancouver all find themselves humming the same…
Raul Malo’s Chords Are Louder Than Your Passport: A Dispatch from the Borderless Republic of Melancholy By “Border” we mean the imaginary line your streaming algorithm draws between “Americana” and “Bolero,” a line as flimsy as wet Kleenex in a Category-5 tweetstorm. If you’ve never heard of Raúl Francisco Martínez-Malo Jr.—the Cuban-American baritone who fronts…
From the Black Hills to Brexit: How Tyler Childers Became the Soundtrack to a Crumbling World By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the latest crypto-broker’s meltdown you could hear it—a Kentucky baritone floating over a banjo like a last cigarette at the end of civilization. Tyler Childers, the coal-dust…
The Cult of the Masked Lullaby: How Sleep Token Became a Global Franchise of Melancholy Dateline: Everywhere, 3 a.m. – Somewhere between the neon shrines of Tokyo and the crumbling cathedrals of Eastern Europe, an anonymous collective in porcelain masks is selling existential dread at arena scale. Sleep Token—our reigning champions of cloaked gloom-pop—have quietly…
The Colosseum of Auto-Tune: MGK’s Global Parade and the Universal Hunger for Rebellion Lite By Our Man in Row 47, Seat C Rome, 2024. The Eternal City—once content to watch civilizations collapse in real time—now queues three-deep around the Flaminio Obelisk for Machine Gun Kelly’s “Mainstream Sellout” tour, a caravan that has already barn-stormed four…
The Earth, that slowly spinning blue-green hostage crisis we all share, has many unofficial anthems. One of them, “Conga,” still leaks from beach bars in Mykonos, wedding marquees in Manila, and—on particularly desperate nights—the karaoke booths of Reykjavík. At the eye of this planetary conga line stands Gloria Estefan: Cuban-American chanteuse, multi-lingual hit factory, and…
